


Five Weapons Niko Leandros Learned How to Use Before He Could Legally Drink (And One He Refuses To Even Consider)

by Sinna



Category: Cal Leandros - Rob Thurman
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Fandom Trumps Hate, Gen, lots of tiny Leandros bros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-22 20:39:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18535075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sinna/pseuds/Sinna
Summary: Exactly what it says on the tin.





	Five Weapons Niko Leandros Learned How to Use Before He Could Legally Drink (And One He Refuses To Even Consider)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tommygirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tommygirl/gifts).



> My gift for Tommygirl as part of the Fandom Trumps Hate exchange.  
> They requested some Niko POV and hurt/comfort. Cal Leandros has been one of my favorite series for a long time, so I'm so happy I got this prompt and I really loved writing this. I think I may have gone a bit heavy on the hurt tho...  
> It's mostly focused on book one and pre-book one events, although there are spoilers for some of the later books mixed in.

  1. Knives:



Sophia was in the midst of one of her rare periods of prosperity. This time, she had enough to rent a modest house in the suburbs. A shop on the ground floor, living quarters above, and a whole room just for Niko and the baby. Not a curtained off corner, or a cramped closet, but a real room, with a bed and a lock on the door.

Five year old Niko was basking in a the luxury of it all when he found the loose floorboard under the bed. The room’s previous occupant had made some effort to hide it, but not so much that it escaped Niko’s careful inspection of his new home. Prying it up, he found a stack of faded photographs showing two smiling girls, a dried bouquet of flowers tied up with dusty ribbon, and a rusty pocketknife with a worn leather handle held together by little more than duct tape. Feeling oddly like an intruder, he slipped the knife out from under the flowers and quickly replaced the floorboard.

Holding the knife, he had visions of using it on the men his mother slept with; on Sophia herself; on the monsters that already haunted his baby brother. At night – while Sophia screamed at the TV in her room and the baby slept restlessly beside him – he endlessly flicked it open and closed, imagining stabbing it into something or someone. Even at five, he knew what a knife looked like going into a body. With the fascination of a child for whom mortality still wasn’t quite real, he imagined what it might feel like to have his hand run red with someone else’s blood.

The night Sophia’s latest boyfriend dumped her, Niko got a crash course in exactly how much mortality meant to him.

With the baby in one hand and the knife in the other, he sat crammed in the corner furthest from the door as it rattled under Sophia’s continued assault. Her words were slurred with drink, but he could make out the alternating threats and pleas well enough. He’d heard similar more than once before.

“Just let me kill the little monster, Nikky,” she begged. “Let me kill it and we can go back to normal. Just you and me, baby.”

Niko held the baby closer and tried to stop shaking. The banging on the door had stopped, but Niko knew better than to hope it was over.

“I won’t let her hurt you,” he promised in a whisper. “Not ever.”

He didn’t think the baby could actually understand what either he or Sophia were saying, but it didn’t seem right not to reassure him. Caliban- No. Niko refused to call him that, even in his head. He wasn’t sure exactly what the name meant, but he knew from the way Sophia said it that it wasn’t anything nice. So “baby” it was, until he could figure out something better.

Sophia started banging on the door again, and Niko curled in closer around his brother. The wood shuddered under the continued assault. Niko began to wonder what would happen if she broke through. He wanted to think he could fight her off with the knife, but he knew better than to actually believe it. He wondered if he could hold his own life hostage, but he dismissed the idea immediately. If anything, she might consider that a bonus.

He looked down at the knife, studying the dull blade. It had seemed so powerful. But now, confronted with real danger, it was suddenly useless.

All he could do was pray that the door held.

\--

When Niko was older, and more capable, he still found himself drawn to knives. No one looked too askance if a skinny fourteen year old wanted to buy one without a guardian around to give him permission. Knives were easy enough to tuck under a coat or in a pocket. He could carry a knife at school, and no one would be the wiser.

At fourteen, Niko wasn’t worried about monsters. At least, not the supernatural ones. He hadn’t forgotten their existence, of course. Cal still woke up at least once a month to find very real red eyes watching him through the curtains. But the supernatural monsters had become something of a background noise in their lives. Despite their horrific appearance, the grendels only watched, never came too close, never attacked. (And if they did attack, Niko suspected that nothing he could do could slow them, much less stop them.) In terms of things Niko had to worry about, they weren’t too high on the list. There were plenty of human monsters to fill the top spots. When your mother was a fraud with a penchant for messing around with the wrong type of guys, you learned to protect yourself, and your kid brother. If Cal had the dubious luxury of worrying about the supernatural kind of monsters, it was because Niko took care of the human ones.

So, naturally, it was Cal who first figured out that the grendels weren’t the only supernatural monsters out there.

“I think Miss Amer’s a werewolf,” Cal announced, referring to Niko’s new eighth grade teacher.

Unlike most parents, Niko knew better than to immediately dismiss Cal’s suspicions.

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, she always acts kind of funny around the full moon, and she wears that scarf on her head I bet it’s to cover her ears, and-”

“That’s a hijab, Cal. It’s part of her religion.”

“It could be both. Anyway, she always smells different than normal humans. Sort of like Mickey.”

Mickey being the Alaskan Malamute that their neighbors three homes ago had kept. Cal had loved the dog but complained about the smell every time it rained.

“Maybe she has a dog,” Niko suggested.

Cal grumbled, but didn’t offer any more “proof” of his theory.

Still, Niko kept it in mind, and scoured the news for any signs of brutal murder or unusual dog sightings. There were plenty of brutal murders, but no dogs.

\--

By the time they moved away, they had discovered that Miss Amer volunteered at an animal shelter most days before school and grudgingly admitted that she _probably_ wasn’t a werewolf. But they’d also discovered that the mild mannered vice principal was a vampire who was in fact very interested in drinking the blood of a half-human like Cal – an interest that Niko quickly remedied with a wooden ruler to the heart.

“Do you think he’s dead?” Cal asked, poking the body with morbid fascination.

“Don’t get so close,” Niko warned him.

“I don’t know,” he added after a moment. “There’s lots of stories about how to kill a vampire.”

“What are the other ones?”

“Cut off its head. Light it on fire.”

“We could do that.”

“Which one?”

Cal looked up at Niko with a disturbingly calm expression. “Might as well do it all. We’re gonna need to light this place up anyway.”

“Huh? Why?”

“So no one can prove it was you.”

He wasn’t wrong.

It was harder than Niko had anticipated, hacking through the thing’s neck. He wasn’t sure if that was because it was a vampire or if it would have been just as difficult to cut through a human. The thought made him sick. But Cal was watching with solemn eyes, and it gave him a sort of strength.

By the time he was finished, he was covered in blood, and he had to make Cal set the fires. He couldn’t help thinking back to Sophia trying to stage a house fire at their last place to get insurance money. It hadn’t worked, but it wasn’t like he had any other training in arson.

As they walked away from that wing of the building, now burning merrily, Cal reached out for Niko’s hand. He didn’t seem to mind the blood.

 

  1. Bow:



The bow was hardly Niko’s preferred weapon. It was large, unwieldy, and people tended to look at you oddly if you carried one in public. The fact that the same could be said of a katana was hardly the point. A katana, as he often pointed out to Cal, didn’t require reloading. At which point Cal usually pointed out that he might as well just use a fucking broadsword if he was going to be so medieval about things, and Niko usually responded by kicking his ass.

That said, there was something immeasurably satisfying about drawing a bow back to its full extension, releasing it with a breath, and watching the arrow fly silently towards its target – whether its target happened to be a monster, or just one of Cal’s beer cans.

The cans burst one by one as Niko’s arrows pierced them, sending a spray of liquid to soak the brick wall behind them.

Niko heard sounds on the rooftop behind him, but he didn’t bother turning around. He’d recognize those footsteps anywhere.

“So this is where my beer has been disappearing to,” Cal remarked, not quite able to keep the amusement out of his voice.

“It seemed like a better use for it,” Niko told him with a smug grin.

“That right? I’ll take that as permission to riddle your carrot juice bottles full of bullet holes then.”

Cal pointed his gun at an imaginary target and mimed taking a shot.

“I’d be delighted to see you practicing in anything other than an emergency situation,” Niko teased.

Not that he really thought Cal needed the extra practice. Those emergency situations came up often enough. And even if they hadn’t, Cal’s superhuman eyesight and reflexes made him an unnaturally good shot. But Cal didn’t want to hear that, and Niko didn’t really want to think about it.

They’d both become experts at avoiding the auphe-shaped elephant in the room.

\--

When Niko was thirteen and Cal was nine, they’d lived for a while out in the middle of nowhere. Sophia was running from her debts again, and the forest in their backyard was a novel and exciting experience for the boys.

There was a small library in what amounted to a town, a few miles down the road, and Niko would often stay there from the moment it opened in the morning until it closed at night. The librarian gave them suspicious looks at first – two grubby boys who never checked anything out and never had a parent with them – but they were mostly quiet and careful to put everything back in the assigned spots, so she gradually warmed to them.

Niko read books on wilderness survival and asked for a list of required reading for schools in the area. He read the entire list, and tried to force Cal to read up to the ninth grade level. More often than not, Cal read a few pages, then got frustrated or bored and reassigned himself a book from the graphic novel section. Niko begrudgingly accepted that at least he was reading _something_ and didn’t object, so long as Cal at least tried the more educational books.

That summer, with Cal’s eyes on him every step of the way, Niko made his first bow, following instructions copied out by hand from one of those wilderness survival books. It was hardly perfect. It was passable, certainly - Niko wouldn’t allow himself to fail - but he was only thirteen years old, and pine was hardly the best wood for it. Still, it worked, and that was all that mattered.

It meant that Cal and Niko could camp out in the woods on the Bad Nights - the nights when Sophia was too drunk to be reasoned with, or when she brought someone home and told them to get lost. Niko quickly gave up on the idea of shooting squirrels for dinner, but they could grab canned beans, or peanut butter and jelly on stale bread, and the blankets from both of their beds, and spend the night in relative safety.

And when Cal shook Niko awake with visions of red eyes – real or imagined – Niko would spend the rest of the night with an arrow nocked on his bow, keeping watch over his little brother.

The bow may not have been his first weapon, but it was the first that he loved.

\--

He’d never quite managed to teach Cal the art of the bow, however. Cal said that he’d learned enough from watching Niko. He said that he’d never need to use one. He said that it felt like a hunting weapon.

“That gun of yours is a hunting weapon,” Niko pointed out testily.

It had been nearly a year since Cal had returned from Tumulus, and the two of them were still adjusting to Cal’s sudden growth spurt. The scrawny fourteen year old who trusted Niko to keep him safe had been replaced with a sullen sixteen year old who had lost the ability for absolute trust.

Cal stroked his handgun.

“Shhh, baby, mean old Cyrano didn’t mean it. You’re for killing monsters and nothing else.”

While Niko appreciated that Cal was getting his sense of humor back, it couldn’t have come at a worse time. He’d given up on the idea that he could protect Cal from everything at every moment. Which meant he needed to make sure Cal could protect himself.

And he needed Cal to stop making jokes about it.

“Come on, Cal. Worst case scenario. I just need to teach you enough to shoot straight.”

Cal kept refusing. Finally, with a huff of frustration, he grabbed the bow out of Niko’s hand, nocked an arrow, and buried an arrow in the center of Niko’s improvised target. With a fluid – almost thoughtless – motion, he unstrung the bow and used it to sweep Niko’s feet out from under him.

“Worst case scenario won’t be a problem,” he insisted.

Niko – still a bit dazed by his unexpected fall – nodded slightly. “Right.”

 

  1. Gun:



Niko didn’t like guns, but he made damn sure he knew how to use one. He wasn’t going to go on some Batman-style crusade – living on a code of guns are evil and killing monsters makes you a monster. He didn’t have the luxury of that kind of morality. This was the real world. If you tried to stick to a moral code, you would end up very dead very fast. Niko’s only code was very simple. Protect Cal. And that meant being prepared for anything.

So Niko went out and bought a gun as soon as he and Cal were settled on their own for the first time. He taught himself to use it over the next week. Coincidentally, that was the week the neighbor’s kids got their hands on a stock of fireworks that had the entire neighborhood briefly ignoring any loud noises that might sound like gunshots.

Cal watched with a sort of fascination. He wasn’t talking much at that point, but he would sit in the corner of the basement while Niko practiced, aiming his gun at the shape of a Grendel, crudely drawn on the opposite wall with chalk.

“Can I try?” Cal asked softly, on the third night.

Niko almost didn’t hear him, with his ears ringing from the gunshots. He hesitated to give Cal the weapon. He spooked so easily now, and one mistake with a gun could prove fatal. But Cal didn’t ask for much these days, and Niko had always had trouble denying him anything.

So he handed over the gun.

Cal pointed it at the target and kept pulling the trigger until the chamber clicked empty. When he turned back to Niko he wasn’t smiling, not quite, but he looked… content in a way Niko hadn’t seen since before the grendels had taken him.

That night, for the first time, Cal didn’t wake Niko screaming with nightmares. When Niko checked on him in the morning, he was fast asleep, the gun clutched in one hand. Niko leaned in to make sure the safety was still on at least.

“That’s one hell of a teddy bear, little brother.”

\--

After that, guns were Cal’s favorite weapon. So, it didn’t take much to imagine that Darkling would enjoy them as well. The only advantage they had against that monster was that they knew it had Cal. For the first time in his life, Niko found himself considering his brother as the enemy. He had to keep reminding himself that this was to save Cal. He had to use every advantage he had.

Still, it was something of a shock when the bullet actually hit him. It hurt like hell, yeah, but that wasn’t what bothered him. Some part of him had really thought that Cal wouldn’t do it. That even with the Darkling controlling his body, there was some sort of bond between them that would mean Cal’s body couldn’t be used against him.

But no. He’d chosen Cal, and Cal had chosen him, but that didn’t mean anything. True love never saved anyone. Familial bonds meant nothing except how similar your DNA was.

Once, just once, he’d like to find some sort of magic that worked in his favor.  

He resisted the urge to suck in a breath as Cal- as the Darkling stepped closer. He watched the thing wearing his brother out of the corner of his eye as it leaned in close with a horrid gloating smile that didn’t belong on Cal’s face.

And then he struck.

Love might not be magic, but it was a damn good motivator.

 

  1. Katana:



A katana was the natural next step after years of martial arts training. He didn’t have to look hard to find someone to teach him. It was even easier to find someone to sell him one.

He liked the feeling of solid steel in his hands. He liked that it had more reach than any of his knives without being much heavier. He liked that the lack of a cross guard made it easier to conceal.

He wasn’t sure how to feel about the fact that the people who did see it tended to think he was some sort of anime freak. It was certainly an improvement over serial killer and psychopath and “quick, Jan, call the police there’s a gangster!” but not as much of one as he would have liked.

“So who are you two cosplaying?” asked a diminutive girl with blonde pigtails an a wooden scythe nearly twice her height.

Niko looked around and realized that half the pedestrians on this street were in costume.

“You wouldn’t have heard of it,” Cal jumped in, while Niko was still trying to figure out how to reply. “The movie’s older than you are.”

The girl breezed right past the insult.

“Which movie?”

“The Final Planet,” Cal lied smoothly.

“Sounds super 80s. Well great job distressing those jackets. I can never get leather to do what I want.”

“We’ve got a friend who does leatherwork,” Niko told her.

It wasn’t even a lie. Probably. Robin had surely picked up leatherworking at some point in his long and varied career. He had to have done something other than just sleep with famous historical figures, right?

“That’s super cool! Well, see you guys around maybe?”

“Yeah…”

When they were out of earshot, Niko raised an eyebrow in his brother’s direction.

“’The Final Planet’?”

“It’s what was playing on SyFy last night,” Cal told him with a shrug.

“I’m impressed you remembered the title.”

Cal shoved his shoulder roughly, but he was smiling. Niko couldn’t help it. He grinned right back.

\--

Niko didn’t cut his hair with his katana. That would have been silly and overdramatic, even if his katana was plenty sharp enough for the job.

Okay, so maybe he’d considered it. Then he’d imagined Cal calling him “Mulan” for the rest of their lives. And then he remembered that there wouldn’t be any rest of their lives.

In the end, he just did it with a pair of scissors in Promise’s absurdly large bathroom mirror.

“Want me to clean that up?” the vampires asked when he emerged from the bathroom with his newly shorn hair.

Niko shook his head. She sighed and ran her fingers through the short, uneven mess.

“If you make it out of this, then will you let me?”

Niko tried to smile. “I’d like that.”

But he wasn’t going to make it out of this. Cal was a strong fighter. Niko himself had made sure of that. And with the Darkling, he wouldn’t be holding anything back. Niko and Cal had never truly fought all out like this. The only Niko would be able to… to kill him… would be to put everything on the line. His own life included.

And if the Darkling didn’t kill him…

Well, he wasn’t coming back. And he thought Promise knew that. She was trying to give him a reason to, but it wasn’t enough. Nothing in this world or any other could ever be enough.

\--

It took a lot of skill to change the trajectory of a katana already in motion from fatal to near fatal. But Niko had that skill. It felt like every moment he’d spent training had led to this. Had lead to this one chance. The Darkling could have killed him. In fact, Niko had been expecting it. He had fully expected to have to use his last breath to get rid of the vile thing. But Cal had hesitated. _Cal_ had hesitated. There was no other explanation. Which meant there was still a real chance they could still separate the two.

And he had to take that chance.

Robin looked askance when Niko picked up Cal’s limp body.

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Nik, you have to leave him.”

“No way in hell.”

He expected more resistance, but Robin simply sighed and took up a defensive stance beside him. And they ran. Samuel was close behind them.

“Should I be worried about keeping you away from bridges?” Robin asked as he sliced into an auphe.

Niko ducked under the assault of another, cradling Cal to his chest.

“Not yet. He’s not dead yet.”

“Niko...”

“He hesitated. He could have killed me and he didn’t. Cal is still in there somewhere. We might be able to save him.”

Robin frowned.

“Just get to the car, Robin. I know someone who can help. He’s too injured to hurt either of us.”

“I’m holding you to that.”

When they made it to the car, Robin took the wheel without Niko even having to ask. Niko took the back, laying Cal down as gently as he could.

“Don’t we need to wait for Samuel?” Niko asked, as Robin took off zero to sixty.

“Look out the window,” Robin replied through clenched teeth.

The man was standing in the doorway, facing down the auphe. So that was why the auphe hadn’t followed them right to the car. They were bearing down on Samuel, gun be damned.

Niko was already preparing for the onslaught of guilt, when he realized it wasn’t coming. Samuel’s sacrifice was buying them time to get away. Time to save Cal.

And there was nothing and no one he wasn’t willing to sacrifice to save Cal.

Cal stirred in his arms for a moment, before passing out again. Niko looked down at him, finally studying the wreck the Darkling had made of his brother.

There wasn’t as much of a change as he would have thought. Sure, he was even paler than normal, and his breaths were coming in uneven gasps, but that was because he was bleeding out. Without those awful silver eyes open he looked no different from the Cal Niko remembered. Which made Niko feel even worse about the aforementioned bleeding out.

Speaking of, now that they were relatively stable – or as stable as a car driving well over the speed limit could get – Niko stripped off his shirt and folded it into a makeshift bandage, which he pressed against the wound in Cal’s abdomen.

“Please, little brother,” he whispered. “I need you to pull through.”

 

  1. Body:



Cal liked to joke that Niko treated his body like a temple. Niko never disabused him of the notion, but in reality nothing could be further from the truth.

Niko’s body was a weapon. One that he’d honed for the sole purpose of protecting his brother. The reason he downed vegetable juice and spent hours practicing was – contrary to popular opinion – not because he actively enjoyed either of those things, but because if he lost his brother _again_ and he hadn’t done everything he possibly could to protect him, he would never forgive himself. He suspected he might never forgive himself either way, but he tried not to think about that in too much depth. He would protect Cal. He would be the stronger brother, despite being the human one, and Cal would never again have any reason to be shaking like a leaf in his arms, or bleeding out in front of him.

One man might not be much against all the horrors in the world, but Niko thought he was doing pretty okay.

If nothing else, Cal was still alive and making jibes about Niko’s diet, and that was good enough for him.

\--

It started with martial arts classes. His fourth grade gym teacher taught karate after school. If Niko helped him set up and clean up after, he and Cal could sit in and watch the class for free. It was more a strategy to stay away from home a little longer than anything else, but Niko found he enjoyed it.

He would practice for hours, insisting that Cal keep an eye on his form. His younger brother had a sharp eye even then, and Niko know that Cal would never steer him wrong. Cal himself didn’t practice nearly as much, but he picked up the skills all the same.

Of course, it couldn’t last. Niko did his best to set up similar arrangements everywhere they went, with limited success. Still, he learned enough. Or so he thought.

It wasn’t enough to do anything when Cal was torn through a hole in reality and disappeared for days and years.

Niko spent the first day praying to every god he had ever read about, to every demon and monster and anything in between. Anyone who might have the power to bring Cal back to him.

No one answered.

He spent the second day just waiting. That was what you did when you were lost, right? If – no, when – Cal came back, Niko would be easy to find.

He didn’t know what he would have done if Cal hadn’t come back to him that night. He supposed that sooner or later he would have gotten tired of waiting and launched a rescue mission. He’s selfishly glad it never came to that.

\--

After Cal came back, after they left the burned ruins behind them, Niko made finding a new dojo his top priority. This time, he didn’t try to bargain his way into watching classes. This time, he paid to join them.

While he was training, Cal would sit in the emptiest corner and flinch anytime anyone got too close, whether or not they seemed to be actively threatening violence.

Niko had attempted to give him a few training sessions back at their apartment, but Cal fought back like a man possessed, with no hint of training or form. After a few weeks and more than a few injuries on both sides, Niko gave up on trying to coax Cal into remember the training they’d spent years working on together. Whatever Cal might remember mentally, his body still remembered two years of fighting for his life against the cruelest beings the world had ever known.

So Niko started all over with him. Cal insisted he wasn’t a baby, but Niko made him practice the most basic forms over and over again, until those instincts were stronger than the ones the grendels had left him with.

\--

  The first time Cal beat Niko in a sparring match without trying to kill him, his eyes went wide with shock. They both knew Niko wasn’t using his full strength, but he was using more of it than he had planned.

“I did it,” Cal whispered. “I didn’t lose control.”

Niko smiled. “I knew you could.”

Cal reached down to help Niko up, and suddenly pulled him into a tight hug.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

“Anytime, little brother.”

Cal’s blood ran a bit colder than the average human. Still, Niko felt warmer in his embrace than he had in months.

 _This_ was why he’d turned himself into a weapon. For the times when he didn’t have to be.

 

+1. Cal:

For all that Niko taught Cal to defend himself, for all that he turned himself into a weapon without remorse, he refused to think of Cal as a weapon. Cal might have been bred for the sole purpose of destroying humanity, but he was Niko’s little brother, and Niko refused to see him as anything else.

It didn’t matter that Cal could fight like a monster. It didn’t matter that half his DNA was auphe. It didn’t matter that he could rend the very fabric of spacetime. Niko looked at him and all he saw was the little boy who scraped his knees when he was six and tried so hard not to cry. The teenager who listened to Avril Lavigne on oversized headphones while he did his homework. The suddenly older teenager who kept his back to walls and hated letting Niko out of his sight. The young adult who watched Georgina with soft eyes, but wouldn’t dare bridge the gap between them. Cal might wonder about his own humanity, but Niko never doubted it. Not even when Cal’s eyes flashed red, or when he spilled blood with a savage smile.

No matter what, he was still Cal.

\--

There was blood dripping from Cal’s nose. Again. And he was smiling.

“Please tell me something punched you in the face,” Niko said evenly.

“If I say yes, will it make you happy?” Cal asked, and that was an answer in and of itself.

He’d been playing with his new powers.

“You can’t keep doing this to yourself.”

The smile dropped from Cal’s face and he tossed the towel he’d been using to mop up the blood into the sink.

“Why not? I need to learn how to use it.”

“It’s not a toy, Cal.”

“Of course not. It’s a weapon. You’re always bugging me about practicing. Well, I’m practicing.”

“You’re risking your life with something you don’t understand.”

Niko crossed the room and tried to dab at the blood still dripping from Cal’s nose. Cal pushed him away.

“I won’t ever understand it unless I use it!”

“You don’t have to use it!”

“Maybe I want to! You’re such a fucking hypocrite, Cyrano!”

“What?”

“You could have turned away from me at so many points. No one would have blamed you. Not even me. You don’t owe me anything. You could have left Sophia the second you turned sixteen and never looked back. You could have gone away the moment I disappeared, or when I reappeared stark raving mad. Or when the fucking Darkling took over. You could have listened to Robin and just killed me and moved on with your life. It would have been perfectly heroic. You could have a normal life right now. Or something like it. Damn, you deserve that. But now. You gave up everything for me. You would do it again, don’t try to tell me otherwise. You’ve used every weapon at your disposal to protect me. So let me do the same for you.”

Niko was struck silent. Cal was trying to hide the fact that he couldn’t meet his brother’s eyes by staring determinedly at his nose. Niko knew, because he was the one who’d taught Cal that trick.

For once, Cal was right. And yet…

“If it means losing you," Niko said, "then I don’t want to be saved.”

\--

_Niko had always been good with people. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t also a complete weirdo. In fifth grade, Cal realized he had to do something about that._

_He confronted the bullies behind the school, knife in hand._

_“Fuck off, short stack,” the tallest of them remarked._

_Cal threw the knife, and it hit the wall by the boy’s head, sticking for a moment before clattering to the ground. Cal had another knife in hand within seconds._

_“Mess with Niko again and I’ll cut your guts out.”_

_The three of them looked at each other, and back at the furious ten year old with too-pointed teeth._

_No one bothered Niko after that._

_\--_

_On the nights when Cal was feeling brave, he didn’t wake Niko when he saw red eyes in the distance. Instead, he reached for Niko’s bow and nocked an arrow._

_“I’m not scared of you,” he’d call out to the distant shape that might have been his father. “Leave us alone.”_

_The figure never replied, although Cal was sure it had heard him._

_\--_

_Cal liked guns. They were impersonal. A very human weapon. There was less risk of losing himself in the bloodshed._

_Still, he had been known to use a gun as a bludgeon when someone had particularly earned his ire._

_“Cal, you’ve got some, uh…” Robin gestured helplessly to the blood coating Cal from head to toe._

_“Bastard got a lucky shot in on Nik,” Cal explained._

_\--_

_Niko never let Cal touch his katana. He’d offered to get Cal his own, but he wasn’t letting Cal ruin his baby. Not that he said it in so many words, but Cal got the message._

_That didn’t stop Cal from grabbing it in midair when a goblin knocked it out of Niko’s grip and cutting the creature in half._

_Niko sighed. “I had that under control.”_

_Cal grinned._

_\--_

_There was something infectious about the gates._

_For a lot of reasons, really. It was terribly convenient, hopping around the city. It was fun to see the looks in monsters’ faces when they realized Cal could open up a hole in their insides without even touching them._

_But more than that, it meant Niko was always within reach._

\--

Cal looked Niko right in the eye.

“Yeah, well, maybe consider that I feel the same way.”


End file.
